rpging across cultures

So, a while back I posted about using an D&D-like role-playing game as part of my teaching with one of our students. (See: Youngmin and the Magic World.) I recounted the story, and promised an update, but I haven’t followed through…

Not for want of RPG action, of course. Youngmin has since rhyme-battled a forest ogre the size of a high-rise, teamed up with a goblin and a dragon to beat his nemesis, then teamed up with a mysterious capoerista girl (yes, capoeira has made its way into the game) and the goblin village’s witch to take on the dragon once it turned on him; he’s in pursit of the capoerista who now has the dragon pearl, in fact…

Theodor Kittelsen’s Skogtroll (1906). Click for source page.

But both I and Mrs. Jiwaku have introduced RPGing into the teaching routines for several more students, along the way. And doing updates for all the little narratives is something I just don’t have time for. A snapshot, though might be fun for others who are trying to think about how to integrate RPG-like interaction into their teaching, so here goes:

Mrs. Jiwaku uses a murder-mystery investigative genre with several of her students, having them investigate a murder by interviewing a cast of suspicious characters. (The first one she did involved an old, alcoholic, rich man who was apparently murdered: but was it by his bitter first wife? By his gold-digging and significantly younger second wife? His greedy and amoral son? Or someone else altogether?) She obviously is using the form to get students to formulate and ask coherent questions in English, without them obsessing over the grammatical perfection of the questions.

Oh, the above image is not just sly reference, by the way: one reason she uses this genre is that some of her students are fans of the BBC TV series Sherlock:

… though she only discovered this after developing the first investigative mystery. In other news, one of those students also studies with me, and will be grilling me on the first episode of Season 1 of Sherlock. Which wasn’t bad, but felt a bit over-acted, juvenilized, and disappointing, in a way familiar from–but less egregious than–Dr. Who of the Matt Smith era. Not that I’m a huge fan of any of the Dr. Who reboot, but Smith’s Doctor just nauseated me enough to give up on the whole franchise, after reticently giving it a try when I felt like Ms. Jiwaku and I were the only people in the world not watching it.

(We are content to live within that minority once again.)

Likewise, I’ve got some other students doing RPG in other ways, for other purposes. For one thing, I’m putting the onus of backstory and worldbuilding onto them. With one of my students, we’re working on his writing, so we came up with a story of a young man, the son of a yangban who was assassinated and who has taken cover on Jiri Mountain, crafting weapons and planning his revenge on the men who killed his father and who he has discovered are, even now, hunting him down too. Homework is basically writing out the narrative that happened last session, and we spend time correcting the text, and integrating the grammar corrections into the next session’s dialog or exposition.

Image taken from an episode of the TV series Joseon X-Files. (Source.)

Another of my students is working on simple conversational competency so we drill whatever grammar she’s working on in our mini-sessions (which are usually just the last quarter of an hour or so). Her character is some kind of Renaissance-era courtly investigator in a corrupt Spanish kingdom; she’s had to deal with the king’s mischevious son, and gotten herself locked up in the dungeons in the process. In our last installment, she’d just discovered true king of the land in the dungeon cell in which she’d been imprisoned,and she is now supposed to write out a plan by which she and the true king will break out of jail.

With her, it’s mostly just getting her to use the grammar we’ve been working on, and giving her stuff to write about, so after some drilling, we use the grammar structure at hand in the game, to reinforce it, and I ask her to write up the story making sure she gets that structure right in her writeup.

But most interesting is the “interactive story” I’ve started with one of the boys I teach. With him, we use English as the language of instruction, which is to say, we study something other than English, but we do so exclusively through English. Until now, we’ve been studying a kids’ prose rendition of Julius Caesar, but he said he was interested in studying the solar system next. I need to try find a book that’s an appropriate level for him, since the (wonderful) book I have on had–Giles Sparrow’s The Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System–is just a little too tough.

The story he’s come up with is the most fascinating of all, and probably worthy of some kind of computer game or RPG setting. It’s vaguely reminiscent of what Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix would have been if it’d been designed by a 13-year-old kid who’d grown up never speaking English, and some geeky Canadian Bruce Sterling fan.(Ahem. It’s an amazing book, for reasons well-explained by this review.)

Anyway, our story is set some ridiculously short time into the future (squint and ignore that), but basically, it imagines the 21st century as being characterized by a conflict between three ideological factions who settle different parts of the solar system after Earth gets ravaged, in part because of a war between the groups, and in part because of climate change spinning out of control. The groups are:

The Mechans: A group of engineers dedicated to a machine-assisted utopian future. They settle the moons of Jupiter, primarily making them home on Europa.

The Biologics: A corps of life-science specialists who work to awakening Mars, either by finding native life and helping it take over, or by terraforming and settling the planet with life of their choosing. Of course, they want the water of Europa… which puts them in conflict with the Mechans.

The Physians: A society of physicists committed to deepening humanity’s grasp of edge physics, and to applications that would blow your mind: they develop the ability to tweak fundamental properties of the universe and weaponize those tweaks. Like, say, “turning up” gravity on Jupiter so it sucks in all its moons, or moving planets. These folks settle themselves in orbit around Saturn, the rings of which are coveted by the Mechans for I’m not sure I remember what reason besides the resulting conflict.

Of course, that’s all ancient history as far as the guy’s characters are concerned. The characters are a brother (strong and tough, but not too bright) and sister (a genius, but ravaged by a serious disease of some kind) who were rescued as infants from cold sleep, the state in which they were found a few centuries after the Mechans, Biologics, and Physians waged a total war that resulted in the destruction of Mars and Saturn, and in all of the moons and satellites of Jupiter being dropped from orbit to the planet’s surface. They live on Jupiter’s sole satellite, an artificial world he named Mechaworld, peopled by the surviving Mechans. (The surviving Biologics have moved on to Venus, and the Physians have branched out to Neptune and Uranus, and points more distant still.) There’s an uneasy peace, and people look back on the insanities of the war with a sense of shame and anger, though it’s history… what can be done about it?

Repeat: he came up with a backstory of a war in which Earth gets destroyed, and then so do Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. (I talked him into letting Jupiter survive, for various reasons.)

Well, something, apparently. History is about to get real, real relevant to the characters. During the first brief session today, time travelers from the future appeared, who brought along the older versions of the brother and sister, to convince them to go back in time to the era when Earth was dead, but Mars, Jupiter’s moons, and Saturn had not yet been destroyed.

Their mission? To find their parents, who were high-level leaders in the Biologics during the war, and talk them out of pushing that red button. Which, in practical terms, means that my student will need to learn a bunch of stuff about Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn: each of the future episodes will involve him reading about a moon or planet, and using the information to get some task done, or even just to survive. (His current homework is to bring himself up to speed regarding Europa, which is the first stop on his characters’ adventure.) What’s cool about this is that he gets to do some research, try to learn things, and put them to use in his story. Yeah, he had to put in a cheesy prophecy and some stuff about the kids being descendants of a king and queen… but whatever. He’s still reading about Europa, and I can always surprise him with the fact the Mechans weren’t monarchists later on…

In the meantime, what can I say? I’ve never seen him more active, never seen him ask a question with such fascination: “How big is Europa? Is it big like the Earth? What’s in the water? Could there really be life there?” (Which is why his homework is to do some research about Europa.)

A gorgeous shot of Europa, released by NASA.

I just wish the book I have (the Sparrow book mentioned above) were more appropriate for his level; it’s optimal for my level, and I kinda wish I was playing this game, just so I’d have an excuse to study up on the solar system a little more each week. But I figure, his studies are enough incentive for me to study up anyway. I’ll try find some resources online that are appropriate to his level, I guess…

By the way, yeah yeah, the above stuff wasn’t solely his ideas. I helped him work out some of it, like some of the details of what the three factions would be fighting, or the intellectual obsessions of the three factions. But I think a lot of people might be surprised how much of it he came up with. I don’t know if he’s just ripping off some comic or cartoon he’s seen, and frankly, if he is, that’s fine: we’ve already departed from whatever source he might have started out using, and things are pretty interesting already.

I can’t provide updates for all these different narratives; frankly, some interest me more than others, but the interest to me isn’t the point. The point is how useful and interesting they are to the students. It makes me wish I could use them with adult students, except I know that most adults will not be so easily convinced to try this method. Pity: I bet it’d work at least as well for them as it does for the kids…

Note: This is the second post in my series on our first experience with Fiasco, and why I designed a new playset for our first game. It makes sense to start from the beginning of this series of posts, though. That’s here.

If you’ve read this far in this series, you have probably come to your own conclusions about how well the playset (and the thinking behind it) fed into the game as we played it.

All in all, I think it worked quite well. In fact, the flubs in terms of playset design mostly had less to do with all the concerns I mentioned, and more to do with the flexibility of the time-setting. Next time I playtest this playset, I’m going to insist on it being played in the present, just to test out this theory.

We had a group of five players, four of whom were expats (all but Miss Jiwaku), and yet we had a good mix of Korean, foreign, and “gyopo” (Korean-blooded foreigner) characters. There were English teachers (Korean and foreign), an office worker (Korean), and an American GI-character. All of these characters to some extent embodied elements of certain stereotypes, but none were offensively so, nor did any of them seem particularly stereotypical in themselves, or in how they were played out.

Given the majority of the players were expats, it was not surprising that the locations chosen were the sort of places expats go to: a hakwon, a Canadian-expat bar, apartments. I wonder whether a higher number of Korean players might have chosen other locations. Similarly, I wonder what kinds of crimes a more Korean-heavy group of players might have come up with.

But all in all, we had a really good group, and everyone did a great job not only playing their own styles, but working with one another’s styles. Whether the playset contributed to this, I’m not sure… I’d like to think it helped, but I can’t be certain.

I will repeat one point from earlier, though, and that is that playsets need to be nailed down in time. I love the idea of a playset set in 1997 Korea, with all the craziness of economic collapse… but it’s not possible to set up the playset to work for both that and a contemporary setting without a lot more careful jiggering and poking than I managed my first time.

I also think having a bilingual playset would help a lot. So would having a playset made with a mix of both English and Korean; that, especially, would give some of the advantage and empowerment to Korean players who are, culturally speaking, probably meeting the expat players more than halfway by playing the game in English. (And likewise, one could include more and more Korean in a playset if the expats playing were looking to improve their Korean… an idea a bit like Kyle Simons’ forthcoming The Magicians RPG, which should be available in March.)

I think I might experiment with this a little, maybe even doing up a mixed-language version of the playset for the next play session… even if the players are mostly fluent in English, it could have some interesting results. (And I’ll bet it would skew players’ selection of elements during setup in interesting ways.)

I do plan on making my eventual playset available some way or another, but it’s going to need some tinkering first…

Note: This is the fourth post in my series on our first experience with Fiasco, and why I designed a new playset for our first game. It makes sense to start from the beginning of this series of posts, though. That’s here.

In my last post on this series, I left off just after the Tilt part of our playthrough: that is, at the moment when things start to go wrong, the Tilt section of Fiasco.

Well, we pressed on without taking a break, because we were short on time. I would have preferred a short break, like the rulebook suggests, but, well, it wasn’t in the cards. What was in the cards, though, was mayhem.

Basically, at the end of the last scene involving Scott, Damien, and Yun Sik, Damien had sent Yun Sik off into Itaewon to call his drug-dealing rivals and try score some drugs off them. Meanwhile, ever happy to have others do his dirty work, Damien sent Scott into those same rivals’ room to search for the drugs.

The next scene was Scott’s, and Miss Jiwaku set the scene with a wonderful amount of in-character stupidity: Scott had not only found the drugs, but snagged some for himself (which he pocketed) and tried some of it out. Then he went out into the hallway to find Damien, who was standing guard. Pretty quickly, Damien figured out that Scott was stoned, and hauled him into Jax and D-nice’s room. Damien grabbed the duffel bag of drugs, checked its contents, and was about to leave, which seemed like things were a bit simple, so I stepped up and made the phone ring. Damien answered it, which was when we learned that D-nice and Jax were drug-dealin’ GI women. (D-nice is a corruption of “Denise.”) So it turned out to be D-Nice’s boyfriend calling. Damien tossed the phone into a nearby class of water — oh, no, wait, it’s not a cell phone, is it? Anyway, Damien did something to the phone, so it wasn’t working. Then, he found Scott passed out on the bed, the drugs too much for his delicate constitution. He planted some of the drugs under one mattress in the room, hoisted the bag of the remaining drugs onto one shoulder, and Scott onto the other… and then, as two MPs showed up in the hallway, he selected a white die, resolving the scene positively for himself. He sweet-talked his way out of being searched and arrested, in part because Scott vomited his guts out at just the right time, and the MPs (played by Katrina and myself) kicked him and Scott out of the building in disgust.

Then we jumped to the next morning, when Jenna showed up at school. She confronted Ju Yeon about her, er, involvement with Scott and past dalliance with Yun Sik, but Ju Yeon brushed it off as nonsense, dismissing Scott as a loser, and Yun Sik as having a small penis. Even as she was about to go to the corporate head office and siphon out a pile of money, including Jenna’s forthcoming paycheck, Ju Yeon reassured Jenna that she was the one she really cared about, insisting that she wanted to leave Korea with her, to go to Paris, to be together in peace. Katrina had resolved Jenna’s scene with a black die, so she was, to some degree, suckered in by the promises of Ju Yeon’s everlasting love in exile.

Ju Yeon’s scene came next, and I resolved it positively. Ju Yeon showed up in a miniskirt and high heels, Yun Sik wanted to confirm that Ju Yeon was indeed going to go to the head office that day and get the bank account info needed to pull off his heist. Ju Yeon followed him (the long way, avoiding Jenna’s classroom) to the smoker’s balcony, and then when they were alone, she turned on the tears, reminding Yun Sik of his promise to help her and save her family; Yun Sik, for his part, was so eager to get the information, and to have Ju Yeon get it for him, that he reiterated his promise, and Ju Yeon, just to make sure he didn’t decide to backstab her, once again implied a sexual reward for him should things work out well.

The next scene was Yun Sik’s and we jumped back to the evening before, when Yun Sik had been in Itaewon, luring D-nice and Jax off-post to get them out of Damien’s way. Here is when we learned that Yun Sik’s English wasn’t really so great under pressure, and that he was painfully awkward with strangers. He told D-nice and Jax (again, played by Katrina and me) that he wanted to “score some nice drugs” and things like that–a really ridiculous, screwed up and awkward attempt at trying to be hip and get some contraband. D-nice and Jax were already suspicious–and preparing to give Yun Sik a beatdown–when Jax’s pager went off. It was D-nice’s boyfriend, having just been hung up on by Damien. D-nice called from a nearby payphone, and realized someone was in their room, messing about. So Yun Sik avoided a beatdown, because D-nice and Jax were gone in a flash, hailing a cab to head back to the base.

My memories get a little fuzzy at this point, but one thing’s for sure: Damien was with Scott in a car, taking off from the base. Somehow, they got into an argument about the terms of their team-up in crime, but Scott was so screwed up from all the drugs he’d taken that there were other, supposedly bigger things on his mind… like Ju Yeon, his (supposedly) virginal wife-to-be. Scott began to insist that he be taken to “Jenna’s hakwon.” He pushed and pushed until Damien relented and took him there. Damien stayed around, though, worried that a stoned Scott would lead the police straight to him… and his big bag of drugs, which I think he had stashed somewhere along the way.

In the next scene, the last Scott-centric scene, Scott turned up at Jenna’s hakwon, having taken hits of whatever weird cocktail of drugs he’d pocketed the night before all through the night. He’d pulled off a scam! He was gonna be rich! He was going to get married to the pure, chaste Ju Yeon! He was stoned out of his freaking mind! Well… he ended up in the hallway of the school, near the smoking balcony, near Yun Sik, and if I remember right they argued as the scene ended… and Scott stabbed himself with a knife in a ridiculous, stoned-as-shit, self-destructive act of dramatic idiocy. Or maybe he attacked Yun Sik and Yun Sik stabbed him? I’m fuzzy on that detail, but either way, at that moment, one Tilt element was fulfilled. (The one involving magnificent self-destruction.)

In Jenna’s next scene, she caught up with Ju Yeon, and asked what the hell was going on. She stood there, talking to Jenna for a moment–basically, Ju Yeon warned her to get the hell out of the building, to go home right away. She questioned Ju Yeon about what was happening, and got on the verge of threatening her from what I could tell, but finally, Ju Yeon convinced her that for once, she was telling the truth and getting out of there was the best thing to do. Of course, Ju Yeon had also grabbed the drugs off Scott after heended up bleeding on the floor of the balcony, and planted them on Jenna, just in case… but Jenna seemed to leave immediately, avoiding the confrontation to come…

Next came Ju Yeon’s scene. She had the information she needed–the banking access codes. She was in the hallway when Yun Sik approached, wanting to confirm that the data-theft had been carried out successfully. But Ju Yeon didn’t want to talk about that, and used the sudden appearance of the hakwon boss as an excuse to go straight to the office and lock the door behind her. Yun Sik came to the office door, pounding on it, and threatening to break the glass. Ju Yeon ignored him, carefully typing the bank account information into her computer and transferring the money. (Which may not have been possible in the average South Korean hakwon in 1997, but none of us thought of that at the time. Ooops.) When Yun Sik threatened to smash the glass door in, Ju Yeon ignored him except to look at their boss’s door, which had a lock of its own; she could always retreat into there if she wanted. She ignored Yun Sik: his scheme had been clever enough, though he was unnecessary to its completion.

Yun Sik’s scene was next, and he gave up on her and went down the stairs and outside; he was in a full-on rage, and found Damien there, being his smarmy usual self. With sirens calling out in the distance, Yun Sik approached the man who (from his point of view) had screwed up his life, and came at him with a pocket knife. Here, the accounts get muddy. If I understand what Ian described a week post-game, Yun Sik stabbed Damien… except that other players remember it in the reverse: Damien stabbed Yun Sik with the pocket knife, and then took off, happy in the knowledge that he was rid of Yun Sik. (I think he even saw Scott getting stabbed on the balcony, and realized he was free of any dangers from his partners.)

Aaaaaand… I think I just blended Damien’s last scene with Yun Sik’s, but I’m not sure. In any case, Damien got questioned by some police, as far as I can remember, but the police were ineffectual and terrible and English (Katrina and I played them) and basically Damien was let go as much as a way of getting out of that uncomfortable conversation as because he was cleared of involvement in the crimes. But I’m a bit mixed up, and maybe Damien just left. Either way, he sort of got away with his crime, but was doomed to be haunted by the experience.

The epilogues are now quite fuzzy to me, as it was a long game session, but I’ll summarize them generally:

Scott bled out on the balcony, thinking back on his horrible mistake and wishing he’d refused to get involved in the crime. There was a somewhat pathetic moment where he flashed back to getting involved, and it was like sad music playing.

Ju Yeon and Jenna ended having some kind of bisexual swinger relationship in Paris, with Jenna always a bit paranoid Ju Yeon might betray her (and I imagine it was likely, but I decided not to show that “onscreen” since Katrina and I both ended up with over thirteen on our rolls at in the Aftermath: I got something like 14 on all-white dice, and I think she got thirteen on all black dice).

Yun Sik also was regretful about his crimes, about trusting all these scummy people. He ended up in the hospital, surviving, but finally killing himself in the end out of shame and ignominy. That’s a fuzzy half-memory though, and I welcome correction.

Damien? Well, he got away with his crime, but was haunted by the experience. Hardened. The kind of person who would make children cry. But he did succeed in one of his needs: D-nice and Jax did indeed get taken down, and ended up in deep trouble for the illegal drugs he left in their room. Damien got a corner on the drugs-for-GIs market…

The aftermath results actually fit most of the characters and their progression through the narrative surprisingly well–a really good aspect of game design, though of course I imagine that if the outcome had been opposite, it would have seemed that way too. Yun Sik ended up a mess, but there was a moment near the midpoint of the story where I imagined he, at the intersection-point of two complexly woven spiderwebs of criminal plotting, might indeed come out on top… all he needed was for one scam to come off right, and avoid being screwed out of the spoils. But in the end, he learned a lesson just as he died: when you need to come out on top in one plot, and avoid being screwed on the other, that’s like two full-time jobs–especially when people are actively trying to screw you over, get you killed, and so on.

Anyway, the epilogues really did fit the characters.

Next time, I’ll discuss my perception of how the game worked in terms of those issues I mentioned in my second post–the intercultural and language-barrier-related ones…

Note: This is the third post in my series on our first experience with Fiasco, and why I designed a new playset for our first game. It makes sense to start from the beginning of this series of posts, though. That’s here.

Also, apologies for the delay. I had a lot of grading to do last week, and some other responsibilities to take care of. I meant to get this posted sooner, but anyway, here it is now!

So far, I’ve discussed what led me to Fiasco as a game, as well as preliminary thoughts on scenario design. Then I discussed the particular concerns I kept in mind when designing my playset for a mixed group of Korean and western/Anglophone players.

This time around, I’ll try summarize the game. Since I think nobody will mind, I’m going to briefly mention at the outset who was playing, and what their characters were, since the issue of a culturally mixed group of players is part of what I was exploring in this playset.

For this playthrough, we had one Korean player (Miss Jiwaku) plus four expats (three who have been in Korea less than five years: Nick. Katrina, and Ian; plus one–me–who’s been here more than a decade). From whjat I gathered, Ian and Jihyun’s only previous experience with RPGs was our past session of Dread. Nick had some experience with RPGs; I don’t know about Katrina’s background and forgot to ask.

Setup took a little longer than usual, in part because due to a couple of players’ late arrival, the pizzas we ordered showed up right in the middle of the process. Nonetheless, we built up a network of relationships, needs, motivations, and locations. At this point, we were playing quite fast and loose with the choices, not really carefully following the rules in terms of dice. Next time, I want to use the dice more strictly in this step, but it wasn’t a dire issue at this point. We also selected more “needs” and “objects” than the game is designed for, which did complicate things… though it worked out well in the end.

Also, happily, Ian had read my little preface to the game. I’d expected we’d be playing the game set in 2012, but he suggested that setting it in 1997, during the Asian Financial Crisis (called by Koreans simply “IMF” because of how South Korea had to adopt austerity policies to get IMF aid during the crisis). This was a time when many Koreans were desperate for cash and nobody among the players would be getting paid (not foreign hakwon teachers, not Korean hakwon staff, nobody); we figured that would lend an edge of desperation to the game. We agreed, and though we slipped occasionally–references to the internet and to cell phones slipped in, only to be modified to pagers and, well, no internet–the reasoning worked. Which alerted me to one thing: flexibility is nice, but the playset needs to be designed to reinforce the time setting. I had USB drives and internet stuff in the playset, which don’t work if the players choose 1997 as the setting. (Let alone the pre-1997 option.)

As for characters and their relationships: since I can’t lay out everything visually, characters in sequence correspond to players who sat side-by-side.

First, there was Scott (played by Miss Jiwaku): a naïve, hard-bargaining, but rather innumerate Korean-American hakwon teacher: his RELATIONSHIPS were as a former coworker of Jenna’s, and a foreigner-soccer-league buddy of Damien’s. He was also, it turned out, desperate to fall in love with a Korean virgin, marry her, and carry her off to K-Town in L.A.

Next came Jenna (played by Katrina), a somewhat conniving female English who had recently been fired from the hakwon where she’d worked with Scott (with whom she maintained a former co-worker RELATIONSHIP), and had been newly hired at American English #1 Hakwon, where she had established a Friends-With-Benefits RELATIONSHIP with the young, supposedly very-Christian hakwon secretary, a young Korean woman named Ju Yeon. Jenna also had an OBJECT: videotapes (originally a USB drive, but modified for 1997) of herself and Ju Yeon having sex, which she intended to use against her, if things went bad between them.

Ju Yeon (played by me) was a secretary at the hakwon where Jenna worked. She talked a lot about her ill sister who was in the hospital, and her poor family whom she needed to support, but in fact besides her Friends With Benefits RELATIONSHIP with Jenna, she also had a one-night-stand RELATIONSHIP with a male Korean teacher at the hakwon, a fellow named Yun Sik. Ju Yeon got a round, apparently; she also had a pretty dire NEED: to get out of Korea.

Next came Yun Sik (played by Ian), a native Korean guy teaching at the American English #1 Hakwon. Besides his one-night-stand RELATIONSHIP with Ju Yeon, he also happened to have a criminal RELATIONSHIP (specifically characterized as a “Theft” relationship) with a GI named Damien (yep, the same Damien who was Scott’s soccer buddy). Yun Sik also had an OBJECT in common with Ju Yeon: he wanted the bank account information from the hakwon, to which he believed she had access during her trips to head office. A second OBJECT was in play as well, in conjunction with Yun Sik: A duffel bag of hallucinogens, though it was more connected with Damien… at least at the beginning.

Finally, there was Damien, a GI (I think a corporal) whose RELATIONSHIPS were soccer buddies with Scott, and fellow-thieves with Yun Sik. Damien was a fast-talking scumbag intent on stealing the OBJECT mentioned above: the duffel bag full of hallucinogens, and he was intent on getting both Scott and Yunsik in on his plan. Damien also had a (unnecessary, but funny) NEED, to take down some “business rivals” (other GIs with an illicit drug side business).

As for LOCATIONS, there were two:

The Smoker’s Balcony at American English #1 Hakwon, the workplace of Jenna, Ju Yeon, and Yun Sik, and

Jenna’s Apartment–a location that only showed up a couple of times. (About even with the Drunken Maple Leaf, a Canadian expat bar… or, actually, I think the bar showed up more often, in something like three or four scenes.)

In retrospect, I think a table at The Drunken Maple Leaf would have been a better second location.

Once setup was finished, it was time to get the game going. In the interests of keeping this post readable, I’ll tell the story as it unfolded, skipping who set what scene and who resolved how. (Also, because I can’t remember all twenty dice and resolutions.)

The gist of the opening scene was that Scott met up with Damien after a game of soccer with the Russian team, who were famous for dealing illegal drugs after games. Damien proceeded to talk to him about how he had a comparable business opportunity, and finally talked Scott into joining him in “getting” some drugs… Scott insisted he would stay in the car, but that if he could do that, he was willing to get involved.

The next scene was between Jenna and Ju Yeon, at Jenna’s apartment. It was the morning after a late-night booty call, and the apartment had been cleaned up. Ju Yeon finished cleaning up as Jenna woke up, barely getting her hand out of Jenna’s purse in time not to get caught. As usual, there was money missing from Jenna’s purse, but she would never have realized that Ju Yeon had taken it unless she’d been too drunk to turn off her hidden sex-camera the night before. Reviewing the tape after Ju Yeon left, she realized two things: Ju Yeon had noticed the camera, and looked straight into it: she knew they were being taped; and Ju Yeon had swiped money from her purse… and seemingly not for the first time.

Later that day, Ju Yeon was messing with a computer at the hakwon office (probably playing some cheap computer game, since this is pre-internet-boom) when Yun Sik walked into the office. He tried to chat her up, she talked with him a little, until finally he asked if she’d been paid lately. She let loose a stream of crocodile tears… her sister was dying, her sister was sick in the hospital, her family needed help, needed money for food and hospital bills… she was desperate, almost crying, and he urged her to pull herself together. He had a way to help, and promised he would do so, though she would have to help too…

In the next scene, Yun Sik and Damien met up at The Drunken Maple Leaf, the expat dive bar in their neighborhood. Damien was single-mindedly working on bringing Yun Sik into his plan, and the won signs (or dollar bills?) were sparkling cartoonlike in Yun Sik’s eyes, though he was pretty uncomfortable with the proposition that he could get involved in the drug trade.

The next scene followed concurrently in the same space, when Scott walked into the Drunken Maple Leaf. Yun Sik and Scott sized one another up, while Damien ran interference. Basically, Scott was angry to be getting a smaller cut of the profits, until Damien convinced him that they could each get 35% of the spoils. (Meanwhile, Yun Sik was skeptical that Scott would get anything for “just staying in the car.”) However, by the end of the scene, fast talk had prevailed and Scott and Yun Sik were in on Damien’s ill-conceived plan… which was to steal Damien’s GI rivals’ drug stash (the duffel bag of hallucinogens). Everyone except Scott and Yun Sik could see Damien was eager to leave his partner(d)s-in-crime swinging in the wind, of course, but the scene ended when Scott raised a toast to their doing business together.

(Nick/Damien’s “Sure, we can split it 35%/35%/35% — thirty-five percent each, okay?” was side-splittingly funny, especially when Jihyun/Scott just went with it like it made perfect sense.)

The next (late) morning, Scott met his former co-worker Jenna for dumplings, and caught up their lives since Jenna had moved on to her new job. It became apparent that Scott was desperate to meet a girl, and Jenna mentioned a girl at her workplace, Ju Yeon (who, secretly, was her FWB). Scott was intrigued, and eager to get Ju Yeon’s number, perhaps thinking that now he could finally afford to marry a nice Korean girl and bring her home to L.A….

The following scene involved Jenna and Yun Sik at The Drunken Maple Leaf, chatting after work. At the beginning of the scene, neither had any idea about the other’s sexual history with Ju Yeon, but after some gossip, Jenna realized that Ju Yeon was not the girl she’d represented herself to be… Yun Sik implied that she was “easy” and had slept with lots of guys, and Jenna, a bit shocked, didn’t let on about her own experiences with Ju Yeon. But she did try to call Ju Yeon, who answered the phone with the usual sob story: she was at the hospital, with her dying sister, cry and weep, hang up. Jenna concluded the scene by telling Yun Sik that Ju Yeon was at the hospital.

The next scene was Ju Yeon’s, but while I could have played it badly, I set up the scene, and let others resolve it. I set it outside “The Drunken Maple Leaf,” where Ju Yeon had brought Scott. Just as she got to the front door, she realized that this was where Jenna had just called from, and tried to talk Scott into going somewhere else… but her feminine wiles–all the way up to the offer of sex right away if they could go to his place–were rejected: Scott was an old-fashioned boy and didn’t want to deprive Ju Yeon of her virginity prior to marriage. (More side-splitting laughter here, and still more when Ju Yeon confusedly asks Scott, “Are you the gay?”) So they went into the bar, and Ju Yeon almost immediately fled to the bathroom, refusing to come out for the rest of the scene, but allowing the other characters to fight among themselves. (Someone, somehow, gave me a positive die for this scene, though I can’t see quite why.)

As I recall it, the next scene after that, Yun Sik approached Ju Yeon at work again, explaining to her that the plan was for her to go to the accounts department next time she got to the head office. She was supposed to collect the accounts information not just for her own branch of the hakwon, but also the information for the corporate heads of the company. Ju Yeoon, for her part, insisted that she be treated fairly, and was on the verge of crying a little more about her desperate family when she hinted she would “take care” of Yun Sik if this plan went off right: she cupped his family jewels, which is a pretty strong hint.

Next Damien got Yun Sik and Scott together and explained the heist in some detail: specifically, Scott and Damien would infiltrate the quarters of Damien’s rivals, while Yun Sik distracted them by calling them off base to try buy some drugs from them. Scott insisted on staying in the car, but Damien talked him out of it, explaining the plan could not work out that way… and the scene ended as Damien sent Scott into the room of his rivals, whom he named D-nice and Jax.

Then came the Tilt section of the game, when it was time to decide just how things would specifically go haywire. I had the highest result with my two white dice, and Ian has the highest black dice result, so we ended up with TRAGEDY: DEATH AFTER AN UNPLEASANT STRUGGLE and MAYHEM: MAGNIFICENT SELF-DESTRUCTION. We decided (prematurely, I think) that the former Tilt element should apply to the Scott-Jenna-Ju Yeon-Yun Sik sex-and-bank-accounts subpot, and the latter to the Scott-Damien-Yun Sik-bag-of-hallucinogens-heist subplot.

And then things got really screwed up… but I’ll save that for next time…

Note: This is the second post in my series on our first experience with Fiasco, and why I designed a new playset for our first game. It makes sense to start from the beginning of this series of posts, though. That’s here.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot in terms of my recent brushes with gaming is the idea of design. I don’t mean game design, because after all in the last two games I’ve tried, Dread (written up here) and Fiasco, we’ve used rule systems designed by someone else.

And those rules systems have worked incredibly well; when there have been (minor) roadbumps in our games, it’s either been an issue of roleplaying (the player, which at points includes me) or scenario design (which, in both cases, falls to me). I want to focus on the scenario design side of things at the moment.

After running a session of Dread, one thing I started to think about was the question of how to get a mixed group of players–some Korean, and some expat–to be able to play an RPG together. It’s one thing to tell a Westerner that Fiasco is a game that lets you spontaneously to make up, as a group, your own weird mixture of Tarantino and Coen Brothers-type film narratives. (To me, the game is more Coen Brothers than Tarantino, but there’s definitely some Tarantino-potential in there.) However, what you’ll find is that most expats you know will have seen Fargo or The Big Lebowski; most Koreans will not have seen those films.

Then there’s the cultural references in the playsets that are out there. They have a strong bias towards places familiar to North Americans, and little wonder: that’s the kind of setting that’s easy to improvise from scratch for a North American, and many of the game’s players are… North America. However, trying to play a game centered on a sleazy disco nightclub in the 1970s with Korean players is about as likely as trying to play a game set in the Joseon Dynasty, during the persecution of the Catholics, would be for North Americans. It’s hard because the cultural referents are different, or, more crucially, they’re absent.

It’s possible, of course, to slip into certain universal, generic, and stylized periods. I have a feeling most Koreans could probably pull off a 1940s/50s-ish hard boiled crime setting in Korea or the States passably. But it’s easier to go with something contemporary, and something familiar to Koreans… they can have the home advantage in terms of cultural referents, because expats are likelier to have the advantage of a more generally fluent knowledge of this schadenfreud-type crime-comedy narrative.

Those advantages, though, in play theoretically ought to be mitigated by players aiding one another, and overlooking certain blind spots. A very simple example is a Korean player who, for example, opting to play a Korean-American who is fluent in English, might speak with certain simple, non-intrusive grammar problems. (An example from our gameplay session was when Miss Jiwaku mixed up pluralization and singulars while roleplaying.) That kind of thing should simply be ignored, or–if the objective of the game is partly improvement of spoken English–gently corrected by a native English speaker and repeated by the player who made the error.

(And, note, the reverse is true: the game could be used to learn Korean, or some other language. During play, at least two expats switched to rudimentary Korean, which was grammar-error laden; it got ignored, but it could have been corrected if our objective was to improve our spoken Korean.)

But in a bigger sense, the in any mixed group operating across cultures, a higher degree of cooperation is necessitated–in the form of brief asides to explain references or idioms, to clarify communication on unclear points, and so on. Likewise, there will almost inevitably be an imbalance in the characters played: both Koreans and Westerners should be encouraged to consider playing a character from the other culture, not just as a case of filling out the story but also as a case of fair play. Most Korean players will be entering into a game where they are already engaged in a culturally foreign activity; if they are the sole Korean player, that is not a problem, but if their character is not only Korean, but the only Korean in the group, that too might be difficult for some players.

(Our group involved a wonderful mix: two expats playing expat characters very unlike themselves; two expats playing native Koreans; and one Korean playing a Korean-American.)

My point about referring to in-play behaviour is simple: intercultural play may require a certain kind of awareness of the complexities of intercultural communication that mean game design is neither the be-all nor the end-all of the issue. This is like any RPG, I suppose: without “good players” the game isn’t likely to go well… but the difference here is that “good players” means something different, or perhaps just bigger, than in a normal, monocultural RPG setting with everyone sharing a common mother tongue. this, again, is something that most expats living abroad (and most Koreans with expat experience) will grok better than most non-expats, which, in the context of playing in Korea is likelier to be a subset of the Korean players.

There’s also the question of how the design of a playset contributes to its spontaneous playability. On one level, this ties back to the familiarity of setting, which in fact reminds me of something I learned at Clarion West: a convoluted, complicated plot works best when paired with a very familiar, immediately-comprehensible setting; but if you want to tell a story about a mind-blowingly alien setting, then you’d better stick to a pretty comprehensible plot. This is surely true in genre fiction: a great example that comes immediately to mind is Benjamin Rosenbaum’s short story “The Man Who Worked for Money” where the setting is so futuristic and so other that the plot is basically some people puzzling at a guy’s weird economic theories, and the guy explaining it, and then one of the characters finding it interesting enough to think about.

There’s a line, of course, and you can skate back and forth across it. Lavie Tidhar does in his wonderful Osama–the noir-ness and the slightly-othered-world feel familiar, then they don’t; the plotline seems simple, then it isn’t; and Ian McDonald in River of Gods. And some of my favorite books (like, say, Accelerando by Charles Stross) goes on ahead and mashes the complexity of plot and the complexity of worldbuilding together. (I’d say John Brunner’s incredible Stand on Zanzibar does the same.) But this method works for countless other SF authors, and along other axes, too: Patricia Anthony wants her stories to be very emotionally rich, so she uses familiar SFnal content so as to make that stuff (for the most part) immediately accessible. (For example, the culture of the Greys in Brother Termite is at once both a twist on the traditional Grey Aliens, and also a familiar trope–the (semi-)hive-mind of 50s Red Scare SF.) I’m behind on Connie Willis’ novels, but the best I’ve read were both time travel books (The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog) and both mostly used very familiar settings for convoluted plots.

Anyway, the point is: a good Fiasco playset uses a setting immediately familiar to the players, which, again, requires a little bit of thinking if you’re working on devising a playset that will work equally for Koreans and for expats.

Take Itaewon district in Seooul, for example. For me, the first things that come to mind are annoying street hawkers, large-sized clothes, and English books — because it’s one of the few places where an English bookstore is located. For other expats, the connotations can be quite different: it can represent a range of things: a haven for the foreigners, a dingy slum full of bars and overpriced foreign food; a dangerous place where GIs and drunk teachers get into fights over bargirls; one of the few places where non-Koreans are able to enter the sleazy Korean underground world of the sex trade; a safe zone for homosexuals. There is no Itaewon: there are many, all in one place.

And then there’s the Itaewon that is conjured up in Koreans’ heads when the name of the district is spoken. That tends toward the sleazy, scary part. A couple of Miss Jiwaku’s friends actually have such a bad mental picture of the district that, even knowing she’s engaged to an expat, they started ranting about drunk losers who couldn’t get a good job back in their home countries and came to Korea to hunt for “easy Korean girls.” Many see the place as one of danger–a sense that isn’t helped by how the Korean media sensationalizes every crime in that neighborhood, especially crimes across race, while soft-pedaling equivalent crimes in supposedly all-Korean areas–and as sleazy, dirty, a haven for the types of foreigners that fulfill every bad stereotype. This is racist, of course… but I could have named another district of Seoul, one of those supposedly all-Korean ones, and you’d see the same in reverse: Koreans would have a more nuanced image of it, while expats would have a one-dimensional one with bias visible all over. (I’m thinking about Jongno, as an example.)

That’s one reason I decided to set the playset in a setting where the Korean and the foreign worlds meet: an educational institution. In fact, in the last decade, hakwons and universities and, most recently, public schools have been one of the few places where the foreign and the Korean intersect on a daily basis. A lot of expats socialize with other expats, in expat bars or otherwise; a lot of Koreans don’t go out of their way to socialize with expats. The only places where foreign and Korean worlds intersect in a setting bigger than a household (in the form of intercultural couples, whether dating or married) is an educaitonal one, or a business one. And since I know little or nothing about the world of foreign companies in Korea, and neither would most of my players, the obvious choice was an educational institution.

This worked, thank goodness. But I should talk more about that after I discuss our playthrough. Which may take a few more days: I’m still trying to piece together the plot, which was tough even when I started (the day after we played our game) and is very hard now. We’ll see what I can pull off, though. Once I started trying to write it all down, parts came back in a flood. Maybe I’ll manage some more later tonight. But I think from now on, I may just quietly record our game sessions, so I can review the results… not for posting, though, since that might make people uncomfortable. But it’ll help with the recaps.